1. NEVER Openweight Heavyweight Title: Taichi [c] vs. Hirooki Goto
Taichi throws a pretty looking gamengiri, but this was boring. It had a lot of Hirooki Goto selling and there have been many situations where Hirooki Goto selling has been very good but this was not one of them. It might’ve gotten good for the last minute and a half but I was checked out by then. **
2. RPW British Heavyweight Title: Tomohiro Ishii [c] vs. Minoru Suzuki
Speaking of very good selling, Tomohiro Ishii is very good at that. He was a tremendous professional wrestler here as he struggled to fight back against the aging but still incredibly capable and incredibly scary Minoru Suzuki. This is a match that has been done before and probably better but it’s got all the ingredients a great match needs and it was fun to watch: intensity, Ishii being so conked out he couldn’t complete an Irish whip, and really really really hard elbows.
There were some special parts: I will always pop for the early sequences they do when wrestling exchanges with the speed and flow of some Lucha stand-off exchange but with kicks and chops. I dug the spot where Suzuki was throwing PK’s at Ishii and Ishii would just absorb them and be like “I AM ALIIIIVE.” And I kind of love that after 20 minutes of ass-kicking Suzuki just sat down and tried to end it with a sleeper. ****
